April 11, 2018

My latest column for the Visual Thesaurus, “Naming the Name of the Year,” looks at the quirky and wildly popular Name of the Year Tournament (NOTY), started in 1983 by some Penn undergraduates and still going strong. One of those undergrads was Stefan Fatsis, who may be better known as the author of several books, including Word Freak, and as an occasional contributor to NPR. I interviewed Stefan for the column, as well as Laura Wattenberg (creator of the Baby Name Wizard website and author of a highly regarded book about baby naming) and Sam Gutelle, who helped revive NOTY in 2012.

The paywall on this column has been lifted, so even non-subscribers can read all about this year’s NOTY contenders, including Miracle Crimes, Babucarr Fatty, Forbes Thor Kiddoo, and Mahogany Loggins.

December 27, 2017

On January 5, at its annual meeting in Salt Lake City, the American Name Society will select its names of the year for 2017. Names of the year are those “that best illustrate, through their creation and/or use during the past 12 months, important trends in the culture of the United States and Canada.” I won’t be attending this year, but I’ve made my own list and checked it at least twice. Feel like playing? I invite you to submit your own nominations in the four official categories.

Bonobos. Founded in 2007 as an e-commerce site, the menswear company Bonobos grew into the largest U.S. clothing brand built on the web. This year, it was bought by Walmart for $310 million in cash, an acquisition that was called more significant in terms of retail disruption than the Amazon–Whole Foods deal, also finalized this year. The Bonobos name is a nod to the endangered ape native to the region south of the Congo River. It's a curious choice for a company that sells only men's clothing: Lower-case bonobos live in female-led groups and are notable for their altruism, empathy, and peaceful behavior. The bonobo name was first used in 1954 by two European scientists who may have misspelled Bolobo, the name of a town near where the first specimens were collected.

June 15, 2017

Fox News is dropping its “Fair & Balanced” slogan, which was invented by Roger Ailes when he launched the network in 1996. Ailes died last month. “In the annals of modern advertising, ‘Fair & Balanced’ will be considered a classic,” writes Gabriel Sherman for New York. “The slogan was Ailes’s cynical genius at its most successful. While liberals mocked the tagline, it allowed Ailes to give viewers the appearance of both sides being heard, when in fact he made sure producers staged segments so that the conservative viewpoint always won. (If you haven’t read Sherman’s biography of Ailes, The Loudest Voice in the Room, I highly recommend it. Yes, it’s fair and balanced.)

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“At some point, we’ve all wondered about the incredibly strange names for paint colors,” writes Annalee Newitz in Ars Technica. “Research scientist and neural network goofball Janelle Shane took the wondering a step further. Shane decided to train a neural network to generate new paint colors, complete with appropriate names. The results are possibly the greatest work of artificial intelligence I've seen to date.” They include Bank Butt (a lavender-mauve), Grass Bat (dusty rose), Stoner Blue (grayish), and these winners:

December 09, 2016

The American Name Society is accepting nominations for Names of the Year, with the winners to be announced at the society’s annual meeting in Austin, Texas, on January 5, 2017. Anyone can play; submit your nominations before January 3.

Here are my own nominations in the categories established by ANS – names “that best illustrate, through their creation and/or use during the past 12 months, important trends in the culture of the United States and Canada.”

December 11, 2015

The American Name Society is accepting nominations for Names of the Year, with the winners to be announced at the society’s annual meeting in Washington, DC, on January 8, 2016. Anyone can play; submit your nominations before January 5.

Here are my own nominations in the categories established by ANS – names “that best illustrate, through their creation and/or use during the past 12 months, important trends in the culture of the United States and Canada.” My top picks are *starred.

December 12, 2014

My latest column for the Visual Thesaurus looks at the most interesting and significant brand names of 2014. Not, I hasten to add, the biggest or most successful brands, but the ones that were “newly prominent or notable” (per the American Dialect Society’s criteria for words of the year) and exhibited linguistic and onomastic merit.

Uber. The rideshare app—based in San Francisco and operating in more than 200 cities worldwide—was founded in 2009, but 2014 was the year it truly became a household word, not always for positive reasons. Yes, the company was valued at a boggling $40 billion in December, up from $18 billion a mere six months earlier. But it was also beset by controversy: lawsuits, protests by licensed cab drivers in many European cities, revelations of unethical behavior on the part of top corporate executives. On the one hand, “Uber”—German for “over,” but minus the umlaut—seemed to characterize the company’s above-it-all arrogance. On the other hand, the app is undeniably popular—so much so that “Uber for __” now describes myriad unrelated businesses in the “shared economy”: Uber for snowplowing, for kids, for pizza, for gentleman companions, for flowers, for marijuana, and on and on.

December 03, 2014

The American Name Society is accepting nominationsfor Names of the Year, with the winners to be announced at the society’s annual meeting in Portland, Oregon, on January 9, 2015. Anyone can play; submit your nominations no later than January 7.

December 12, 2013

My new column for the Visual Thesaurus is a year-end look at some significant brand names of 2013. As I say in my introduction, it isn’t a list of the biggest or more famous companies; rather, it’s my subjective catalog of names that were “newly prominent or notable” (per the American Dialect Society’s criteria for words of the year), showed linguistic significance (or “interestingness”), and represented naming trends or breakthroughs.

Access to the full column is restricted to subscribers (subscribe! an excellent gift!). Here’s one of the 10 names on my list:

Redskins. Football’s Washington Redskins have had that name since 1937 – before that, the team was the Boston Redskins – but in 2013 there was renewed pressure to change what many Native Americans and others see as an offensive term. In a 29-page report issued in October, the National Council of American Indians spelled the name with an asterisk (“Redsk*ns”) and decried the team’s “ugly” legacy of racism. Ten members of the U.S. Congress, 60 clergy members, and President Obama called for a name change, and several newspapers, including the San Francisco Chronicle, stopped printing the Redskins name in stories about the team. On the other hand, Toronto Mayor Rob Ford — not exactly free of controversy himself this year — also weighed in, saying a name change would be “ridiculous.”

Read the rest of the column. And watch this space in the next couple of weeks for more names and words of the year.